IE8 tab crashes with res://ieframe.dll/acr_error.htm

I worked on a client project recently and I encountered during finalizing the project that the website kept crashing constantly in IE 8 under Windows XP. Since I develop under OSX it took me quite a while to nail down the problem, it turned out that the browser crashes only when 3 certain criteria are met:

the jQuery library v.1.6.2 is used

a facebook like button is used (e.g. <fb:like layout=”button_count” … >) and the xmlns namespace is set

a background-image is set on the <body> element via CSS

If all these 3 things are happening at once, and the page is viewed in Internet Explorer 8 under Windows XP in ‘IE8 Standards Mode’ (not Quirks Mode!), the browser tab crashes constantly on reload.

Some users at stackoverflow (here and here) suggested to force IE compatibility mode for IEs < 9 with

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7">

so I tried to do this with conditional comments (I did not want to force IE9, too) but that did not help.Probably the easiest solution is to use a newer version of jQuery.

I created a demo-set, it might help others to track down and avoid this (very rare, but very annoying) issue. Make sure you use IE8 and Windows XP to see your browser tabs crashing :)

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lekofv
2012-03-22 /
19:01

i have the same problem, i’m using jquery 1.5.2 i try change all of the steeps that you say but nothing… i’m using drupal 7, i have this problem only in IE8, in IE7 and IE8 Compatibility view works perfect and in firefox, chrome, safary works too … HELP !!

magrolino
2012-03-23 /
21:02

lekofv, do you have a url where I can see / test your code? if, i can try to help of course!